Wearable Health Devices in the Workplace: The Importance of Habits to Sustain the Use

The use of wearable health devices, such as activity trackers or biosensors, offers great potential for managing one’s health levels. Since they are affordable and widely available, organizations are also taking advantage of these systems (referred to as physiolytics), seeing an opportunity to handle some health-related challenges in the workplace. However, once physiolytics are implemented in the workspace, organizations face difficulties in sustaining employees’ participation. This is a major problem because, to generate data that can contribute to personal health empowerment, physiolytics need to be used in a continuous manner. Habits are recognized as significant factors in determining sustained use of physiolytics, but there are no precise investigations on how organizations can have impact on this matter. Given that habits are highly context- dependent, organizations have the opportunity to create favorable conditions, so that participating employees develop a habituation towards the use of physiolytics. Accordingly, in this paper, we conduct a narrative review to critically evaluate reported evidence and, then, formulate concrete propositions to support wearable health devices’ habituation. We therefore aim to provide practitioners with upstream interventions to concretely help them in increasing the success of physiolytics’ implementation as well as open the way for further investigations in this strand of research